Silence for our health
Perhaps it has always felt this way.  But it feels to me like today, we live our lives as if extra-strength was the minimum dosage.  Our everday pace feels like the manic race to finish a term paper at the last minute, except we are always in the last minute.  There is no reprieve.  Other than sleep, which itself seems negatively impacted, we are always rushing in a million directions at once, pretending that this is productive, that it will only last until the next punctuation mark.  But we just keep ratcheting up the noise.  An interesting commentary in today's Beacon suggests we have stumbled into an emotional, physical and spiritual diet that lacks essential nutrients, most noticably missing regular, relaxing, reflections in silence.

The commentary quotes outgoing Pope Benedict, whose approach to living has never struck me as particularly Christian, but he gets it right here, highlighting the spiritual, social and political reasons to seek out silence in our daily lives...

“In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth; we understand with greater clarity what it is we want to say and what we expect from others; and we choose how to express ourselves. By remaining silent we allow the other person to speak, to express him or herself; and we avoid being tied simply to our own words and ideas without them being adequately tested. In this way, space is created for mutual listening, and deeper human relationships become possible.”

One of my objectives as teacher is to help us all each learn to think, to value a life of the mind because it will enrich our lives and careers and help us more productively address the conflicts and challenges we face together.  Teachers attempt to do this by finding engaging readings that challenge us to re-think and think more deeply in writing and in conversation.  Today, I encourage us to rediscover an age-old ingredient of a life well-lived that is at some risk in the internet era: silence and silent reflection. Meditation, prayer, singing, poetry, Tai Ji, yoga, reading for fun, and many other activities are each valuable ways to improve our capacity to understand and transform the conflicts in our lives, and this is the case, in part, because each puts a premium on cultivating a daily habit of silence and silent reflection.  Learning to listen, step one, learn to be silent.

'Hannah Arendt, in The Life of the Mind, puts it this way: “Thinking is always out of order, interrupts all ordinary activities and is interrupted by them.” Yet we need to do it. Socrates, she reminds us, didn’t always have the answers, and wasn’t always interested in dialogue. Again and again, Arendt says, we see him going off alone to think.'